Vasa Velizar Mihich (b. 1933) is one of the most distinctive Yugoslav-born American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose pioneering explorations of cast acrylic sculpture transformed the possibilities of the medium and established him as a defining voice of the Los Angeles Light and Space movement. Academically trained as a painter, Vasa originally taught theories of color as a senior professor of design at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he shaped generations of Southern California artists over a distinguished teaching career of more than fifty years.

Vasa began creating his striking transparent plastic sculptures in the late 1960s in his Los Angeles studio, and he continues to this day to explore the possibilities and development of these cast acrylic works, remaining a forward-thinking innovator well into his ninth decade. His signature columns, cubes, and geometric constructions, built from carefully calibrated layers of colored transparent acrylic, transform ambient light into an active sculptural element, refracting, layering, and shifting color as the viewer moves around each piece. The results are works of unusual perceptual complexity that reward extended looking and change with the changing light of their surroundings.

Henry Seldis, the former art critic for the Los Angeles Times, referred to Vasa as "the most sensuous and sensational colorist of the Southern California artists working in plastic," a description that captures both the sensory richness of his practice and his central position within the West Coast tradition of light-based art that also produced James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. Working in dialogue with this broader Light and Space movement while pursuing his own distinctive material investigations, Vasa established cast acrylic as a serious sculptural medium capable of the most refined chromatic and spatial effects.

Vasa's sculptures are held in major American museum collections, and his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He continues to work from his Los Angeles studio, extending the material vocabulary he has made his own for more than half a century.